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ADDRESS 


DELIVERED BEFORE 

Oakwood Memorial 
Association 

RICHMOND, VA. 

SATURDAY, MAY 7, 1910 


BY 

HENRY ROBINSON POLLARD 



IT 


WHITTET & SHEPPERSON, PRINTERS 
RICHMOND, VA. 








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ADDRESS. 







ADDRESS 


DELIVERED BEFORE 


Oak wood Memorial Association 

Saturday, May 7, 1910. 

Richmond, Va. 


BY 

HENRY ROBINSON POLLARD, 

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Private of Company “E” 24th Va, Cavalry, Gary’s Brigade, 
Army of Northern Virginia, Paroled at Appomattox 
Court House Virginia, April 10, 1865. 



Richmond, Va.: 
Whittet & Sheppersoh 
Printers. 



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ADDRESS. 


Mrs. Fresident, Members of the Oakwood Memorial 
Association, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

I esteem it no small compliment to be called upon 
to address one of the oldest and most efficient of the 
many Confederate Memorial Associations of the South. 

The thought that produced the Confederate Memo¬ 
rial Association was a happy one. The prompt and 
cheerful assumption of a self imposed obligation to 
honor the memory of those whose deeds of valor, we 
now and here revive, bespeak a devotion to duty as 
noble as that which characterized the men who surren¬ 
dered their lives on the altar of their country. Most 
of the original actors in these annual occasions have 
passed over the river and now keep company with the 
noble patriot and warrior Stonewall Jackson, who was 
great in death, no less than in life, vanquishing the last 
enemy by his immortal saying “Let us pass over the 
river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” 

The women of the South, standing amid the wreck 
and ruin of a long and disastrously ending war, with 
intuitive prescience, organized a movement which has 
done more, than all besides, to fix the standard of vir- 
ture and patriotism by which the cause of the Confed¬ 
eracy and its adherents must be judged. 

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Neither the energy, nor genius of the Southern lead¬ 
ers, who so quickly, and yet so thoroughly, converted 
an agricultural and peace loving people into a great 
military camp, and organized, mobilized and trained 
large armies not only able to repel great invasions, but 
to undertake and prosecute aggressive campaigns into 
an enemy’s country, were fVMo potent to convince the 
world of the pure and noble purpose of our people, in 
our struggle for independence, as has been your im¬ 
movable purpose to vindicate and honor the dead. The 
world renowned cannonade at Gettysburg, the unyield¬ 
ing phalanx of the army of Northern Virginia at 
“Bloody Angle,” the half starved, yet unterrified vet¬ 
erans at Petersburg, appealed in vain for recognition of 
their purity of purpose. Yours was “the still small 
voice,” heard after the thundering of war had ceased, 
proving the truth of old John Milton’s couplet, 

“Peace hath her victories, 

No less renowned than war.” 

This better understanding between the sections of 
our country has led the great mass of thinking people, 
North, and South, to comprehend that the South in 
seceding from the Union was exercising a right re¬ 
served under the Constitution, while the North, in 
denying this right and forceably seeking to perpetuate 
the union, inaugurated and prosecuted a revolution; 
that could be only justified under the Declaration of 
Independence, which declares: 

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“That to secure these rights, (life, liberty and the 
pursuit of happiness) Governments are instituted 
among men, deriving their just powers from the con¬ 
sent of the governed, that whenever any form of gov¬ 
ernment becomes destructive of these ends, it is the 
right of the people to alter or to abolish it, ?md to in- 

V V 

stitute new government, laying its foundation on such 
principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as 
to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety 
and happiness.” 

As eloquently said by President Alderman of the 
University of Virginia, in a recent address: 

“The war between the states was a brothers’ war, 
brought on, as our human nature is constituted, by the 
operation of economic forces, the clashing of inherited 
feelings, the impact of different notions about the 
meaning of liberty woven by no will of either section 
into the very fabric of the people’s life. Thus fate 
driven, the sections came to war embodying in stern 
antagonism two majestic ideas—the idea of local self- 
government and the idea of union. No war in human 
history was a sincerer conflict than this war. It was not 
a war of conquest or glory. To call it rebellion is to 
speak ignorantly; to call it treason is to add viciousness 
to stupidity. It was a war of ideas, principles, politi¬ 
cal conceptions and of loyalty to ancient ideals of Eng¬ 
lish freedom.” 


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If by common and unanimous consent, we come to 
this view, as we should, all occasion for crimination 
and re-crimination is removed, and we can all alike hold 
and teach that the spirit that actuated those who lead, 
as well as those who followed, on each side was greater 
than their deeds even though 

“Their names are writ, 

Where stars are lit.” 

The most valuable and enduring tribute that we can 
make our dead, and may I say, that I believe they 
would prefer us to make, will be to honor the spirit and 
purpose with which they served and sacrificed. 

The cause for which they fought failed, but the 
spirit that actuated them remains a heritage to their 
children of unspeakable value. 

“The material decays; the immaterial of which the 
material is the symbol and instrument does not decay. 
It dies not, it cannot die. The temples and statues 
of Greece are in ruins, but the beauty which they inter¬ 
preted to the world, the world has never lost and can 
never lose. The palaces and roadways and aqueducts 
of Rome are in ruins; but the sense of law and order 
which Rome gave to the world, the world still 
possesses.” 

The Confederacy is dead, but the spirit that brought 
it into life and made it glorious in its achievements is 
not dead, and can never die. The spirit has found ex- 


pression in the energy, the alertness, the courage and 
the hope that survived it. These essentials of worth 
endured, and they have given us a new South, stronger, 
happier and greater than the old. 

I can never forget the despair that seemed to leaden 
the very air at Appomattox. The great chieftain, Lee, 
while he bore with becoming fortitude the reverses 
that there forever sealed the fortune of the Confederacy, 
yet seemed to see but little in the future of his loved. 
State, solacing his saddened heart with the aphorism 
that “Human fortitude should be equal to human ad- 
versity.” 

I remember with the clearness of an occurrence of 
yesterday, the sad lament of the courtly Littlebury 
W. Allen, a minister of the gospel, a true, brave and 
venerable captain of a company in the regiment to 
which my company belonged, uttered in my presence, 
when he realized that the order to cease firing along 
our scant line of battle on an approaching column of the 
enemy, meant a surrender, He said “This means all is 
lost, and, for the future, we of the south are to be hew¬ 
ers of wood and drawers of water.” 

But thanks to God, the next day, while we lingered 
on historic ground to procure from the enemy rations 
for the first time, since we left camp below Richmond, 
just one week before and to recieve our paroles, to ev¬ 
idence to our children our honorable discharge, that 
true, brave Georgian, Lt. General John B. Gordon, 

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mounted his horse and rode from regiment to regiment, 
speaking words of courage and hope to officers and men 
alike. And thus, as the sword, which Victor Hugo elo¬ 
quently called “but a hideous flash in the dark,” was 
sheathed, a feeble ray of light broke upon the hearts of 
many, and later when “the blackness of the darkness 
of the reconstruction” had passed, it lighted up the 
pathway until visions of the angel of peace were seen 
bringing prosperity and happiness to a reunited and 
prosperous people. And so, it came to pass that those, 
who had once clutched at each others throats fought 
side by side, in every military rank, to rescue Cuba 
from Spanish oppression and thus give independence 
to the Queen of the Antilles. 

If the cynic, if such be among us, question the loyal¬ 
ty of the Confederate Soldier, who experiences and 
expresses these sentiments, I point him to the patriotic 
and memorable words of Gen. Robert E. Lee, uttered 
soon after the close of the war. He said: 

“All good citizens must unite in honest efforts to 
obliterate the effects of the war, and to restore the 
blessings of peace. They must not abandon their coun¬ 
try, but go to work and build up its prosperity. * * * 
True patriotism sometimes requires men to act exact¬ 
ly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at an¬ 
other, and the motive that impels them, the desire to 
do right, is precisely the same. The circumstances 
which govern their actions change, and their conduct 

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most conform to the new order of things. History is 
fully illustrious of this. Washington himself is an 
example of this. At one time he fought against the 
French under Braddock; at another time he fought with 
the French at Yorktown under the orders of the Con¬ 
tinental Congress of America, against him. He has not 
been branded by the world with the reproach for this, 
but his course has been applauded.” 

Great as Lee was in military achievements, he was 
greater as a civilian. He placed a standard by which 
human conduct may be measured in every age, under 
every condition, when he uttered the sublime senti¬ 
ment : 

“There is a true glory and a true honor; the glory 
of duty done, the honor of the integrity of principle.” 

In the eloquent oration delivered on the unveiling 
of his recumbent statue, at Lexington, the master¬ 
piece of oiir own talented and genial Valentine, the 
silver-tongued Daniel, whose slowly ebbing strength 
admonishes us to prepare to shed tears, said: 

“As little things make up the sum of life, so they 
reveal the inward nature of men and furnish keys to 
history. It is in the office, the field, the workshop, and 
at the fire-side, that men show what stuff they are 
made of, not less, than those eventful actions which 
write themselves in lightning across the skies that 
mark the rise and fall of empires.” 

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So the immortal Shakespeare makes Mark Antony 
in his oration over the dead body of Caesar say: 

“When the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept.” 
The noble example and sound advice of our great mil¬ 
itary chieftain set, I believe, pace for reconciliation of 
the sections and reclamation of our fortunes, and they 
have brought forth results far more abundant than the 
most optimistic could have anticipated. Yet much 
remains to be done. We have great and serious prob¬ 
lems pressing upon us for solution, hardly less imperil¬ 
ling our freedom than those that underlaid “the irre¬ 
pressible conflict.” 

Some of these are dangers of a partisan, or subsid¬ 
ized press, municipal mismanagement, official graft, 
fraud in elections, and combinations, representing 
either great aggregations of wealth or numbers, in¬ 
tended to control, or to dictate the terms on which the 
business, or material part of it, of this great country, 
shall be conducted. 

In these sacred precincts, in the presence of the 
ashes of the noble dead, we should dedicate ourselves 
to the sacred task of wisely solving these problems. 
In order to meet this obligation we must lift our city 
and state into high ideals, that our lives may illustrate 
the same devotion to duty that actuated the sixteen 
thousand dead heroes that are here entombed, to whose 
singleness of heart and purpose, we pay homage to-day. 


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A country, a nation without ideals is doomed to 
perish before the steady tread of the advancing hosts 
of ethical and material progress. Spain in the forefront 
of the Nations, once owned more than half of this con¬ 
tinent, but she had no higher ideal than that embodied 
by her conquering hero Cortes, in the sordid message 
sent to the King of Mexico: “If” said he “the king of 
Mexico has any gold, let him send it to us, for I and 
my king have a disease of the heart which is cured only 
by gold.” Three centuries later she became a third rate 
power among the nations of the earth, and with the 
independence of Cuba, she lost the last foot of terri¬ 
tory owned by her on this side of the Atlantic. The 
captains of industry and of finance of our times, whose 
ideals are prosperity, rather than probity, or riches 
rather than righteousness, have sadly departed from 
the ideals of our fathers, who preferred death to the 
loss of liberty and sought freedom in the wilds of 
America, rather than surrender conscientious convic¬ 
tions of duty at the behests of King or by order of ec¬ 
clesiastical edicts. 

As clearly pointed out in the able and thoughtful 
book recently produced by my life long friend and for¬ 
mer colleague in the Virginia Legislature, the Hon. 
Beverly B. Munford, Virginia did not rush heedlessly 
into the war. She never lost hope of preserving the un¬ 
ion, until she was called upon to furnish troops to com¬ 
pel the surrender of the constitutional right that be- 

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longed, as she believed, to the States peopled by her 
sons. Her decision determined that the war was to be a 
real and final settlement of the two conflicting prin¬ 
ciples, not a mere postponement. The decision brought 
the long delayed crisis and the crisis brought the war, 
and the result cf the war ended the controversy. 

All honor to President Davis for his noble and 
patriotic sentiment, so eloquently expressed in the clos¬ 
ing paragraph of his great work on the “Rise and Fall 
of the Confederate Government/’ He there clearly 
states his view and his hope of this ending. He says: 

“In asserting the right of secession, it has not been 
my wish to incite to its exercise: I recognize the fact 
that the war showed it to be impracticable, but this 
did not prove it to be wrong; and now, that it may not 
be again atternped, and that the union may promote 
the general welfare, it is needful that the truth, the 
whole truth, should be known, so that crimination and 
‘re-crimination may forever cease, and then, on the basis 
of fraternity and faithful regard for the rights of the 
States, there may be written on the arch of the Union, 
Esto perpetua.” 

Surely these are words fitly spoken, which the wise 
man likens to “apples of gold in pictures of silver.’’ 

And now in closing this address, which shall have, 
at least one characteristic of excellence, that of brevity, 
may I be permitted to say, that the women of the 

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South have no more sacred mission than to vitalize all 
that which is true, beautiful and good, for they con¬ 
stitute, as Aristotle taught four hundred years before 
the Christian era, the last analysis of virtue. 

The stature of that forceful, fearless, faithful, yet 
womanly woman, Francis Willard, in the Hall of Fame, 
is none too generous a recognition of what she did for 
the uplift and amelioration of mankind. The State of 
Illinois has honored herself, in honoring her. Florence 
Nightingale, England’s ministering angel to her sick 
soldiers in Crimea, and Frances Willard, America’s 
most bewitching and effective reformer, are inspiring 
examples of what consecrated women, with high ideals 
can accomplish. May God multiply their tribe, and 
magnify their effectiveness, that at the end of this cen¬ 
tury, so potent will be their work, when the States 
shall again call the roll of their illustrious dead, the 
statures of a score or more of women, may be sent to 
keep company with that of Illinois’ immortal daughter. 

Not many more of these annual occasions, when you 
come to strew flowers upon the graves of the dead, will 
you be able to call to address you one who “wore the 
gray.” Though your humble speaker on this occasion, 
is now in “the yellow and sere leaf,” yet when he rode 
in the last regiment of Confederate soldiers that left 
the capital of the Confederacy on the third day of April, 
1865, and a little later saw from the hill on the south 


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side of the river the flames that devastated a large part 
of your beautiful City, he was still in his teens. All 
that were then of mature years, as well as the then 
strong, in middle life, and most of the buoyant in young 
manhood have gone. Of them all it may be said: 

“The good knights are dust, 

And their good swords are rust, 

And their souls are with the saints, we trust.” 

Whether on the fields of battle, contending with 
the adversities and hardships entailed by the war, 
they died in the harness, actuated bj' devotion to duty, 
and deserving of your veneration. 

“The Old Guards” of Napoleon had a regulation 
v/hich required the names of all their members killed in 
battle, to be retained on the muster roll and when the 
names of such were called, at the daily roll-call, some 
comrade advanced two paces to the front and answered, 
“Killed on the field of battle.” The roll of our dead is 
too long to be called, but their names are registered 
in the book of everlasting remembrance of a loyal and 
patriotic people. 

Confederate veterans! Dead or alive, in the name of 
the Ladies of the Oakwood Memorial Association. I 
salute you! If dead, peace to your ashes! If alive, may 
you be true to principle, till you have “fallen on sleep.” 


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